This is a podcast for the curious. Strap yourself in for genuine dialogues with people who think deeply and are ready to tackle the big questions, such as broadcaster Terry O'Reilly, fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay, and journalist Sally Armstrong.

One of the most compelling subjects I want to tackle on this
show is virtual reality. Because VR goggles have been around for
decades now, we can see what’s going on behind them as an ongoing
fad – we’re told, again and again, that the change will be
overwhelming. But a brave new world of augmented reality never
quite materializes.

However, there are discoveries and advances taking place right
now which have major implications for our economy, our politics,
our understanding of self and reality – indeed, for the very idea
of consciousness. Virtual reality, or augmented reality, whatever
we want to call it – the subject doesn’t just touch on the hard
problem of consciousness in science and philosophy, but on the very
meaning and value of the world we think we are living in. Elon Musk
has suggested that the likelihood we are living in so-called “base
reality” (in other words, the likelihood that this reality, in
which I am speaking into a microphone and you are listening to my
voice, the likelihood that this reality is real and not a
simulation) is something like one in a billion. Why? Because it
seems like our civilization is on a path whereby pretty soon we
will be able to create virtual reality (say, in the form of a
high-definition and extremely responsive video game) that is
indistinguishable from the reality that we know. It could have all
the sights, smells, tastes, sounds and feelings that we are used
to, and therefore we could be in that simulation right now. It’s
not far off from The Matrix.

If this path is possible, then in a universe of endless
possibility, it will almost certainly happen. And if it will
happen, what’s to say it hasn’t already happened? Maybe we
are in a simulation of a simulation of a simulation, and so forth?
For another film reference, there’s the dream within a dream within
a dream of Inception, from 2010. The reason why this is
ripe for conversation, maybe moreso than when The Matrix
was released in 1999, is that we are getting closer to building
virtual reality that is in fact inseparable from base reality. For
your third film reference, there’s Ready Player One from
this year, based on the book from 2011 by Ernest Cline. In it, our
overpopulated civilization is in obvious decline, but everybody is
linked up on the Oasis, a massive global VR network where they can
can play out their fantasies and ignore what’s really happening.
Unfortunately, the film is little more than an action-packed blast
of pop culture references and nerd pornography, which fails to ask
the much more juicy questions of virtual reality and what the
future looks like. In any case, all of this does beg our question,
what on earth is going on?

I want to talk about an article I read in the New
Yorker from April 2nd, written by Joshua Rothman, called “As
Real as it Gets”. The piece starts off in the philosophy of
consciousness and the study of out-of-body experiences. Rothman,
the writer, goes to a well-regarded VR lab in Barcelona. He is
plugged into various experimental machines. He has out-of-body
experiences, he steps into the shoes of other people in a virtual
reality, and he feels a “phantom touch” when his virtual limbs
interact with virtual objects and his real limbs experience real
feelings. One of the most profound moments in Rothman’s article is
when he has a conversation between himself and Sigmund Freud, the
19th century Austrian psychologist – in which he acts and speaks as
himself and then he acts and speaks as Freud. Using virtual reality
goggles he sees a computer-generated version of himself (which the
Lab made from a scan of his body) sitting across from a
similarly-generated version of Freud. At the press of a button, he
rotates between the two bodies, and has a 20-minute conversation.
Through Freud, he says things to himself about his real problems
that he never would have said otherwise; indeed, it was as if he
really was two different people having a real dialogue.

If we trust that this is possible – and remember that Rothman is
hardly the first or last person to have such an experience – then
we can obviously ask what doors this opens for a virtual future.
Not just psychology, but medicine; not just gaming, but how we live
life; and not just experience, but consciousness. What does it mean
to be you? Rene Descartes famously said, “I think therefore I am”.
But just because I think and therefore am, does not mean that there
are dimensions of reality that I am not seeing – it does not mean
that you are not being deceived by what you think is real.

18th-century philosopher George Berkeley argued that all reality
was purely in our minds. But this is not just speculation or hokey
philosophy. As is becoming apparent in labs like the one Rothman
visited in Barcelona, our conception of ourselves and our reality
is crucial for understanding mental illness as well as mental
fitness. Maybe consciousness is a byproduct of my reality, which
makes sense if we realize that our brains make decisions
milliseconds before they have time to process the information into
conscious thought. In other words, the thought of a decision comes
after the brain takes action. It’s a reversal of the
cause-and-effect relationship we intuitively assume.

Consciousness is arguably just our brain’s attempt to explain
itself to itself. This notion is given some impetus from
experiments on people who have had their right and left brains
severed from one another, in order to prevent seizures. Because
language is almost exclusively the domain of the left side of the
brain, if the right side perceives something, it not only can’t
describe it, but it is not even really conscious of it. And yet if
the perception causes action – say, the words “step forward” causes
the person to step forward – then the left brain, disconnected from
the perception of the right, will come up with an explanation for
the step forward. After the fact. Such as, I’m thirsty.
Totally false, but the person is totally convinced.

As we go deeper and deeper into virtual reality, and step
further and further away from the only selves we humans have ever
known, what questions and answers will we uncover? What other
paradoxes are we yet to encounter?

One last point about this, is story. I often use the word story
on this program, whether in my attempt to get to the bottom of what
on earth is going on, or in the principal query: what are the
events, characters, forces and ideas that shape the human
story today? It’s important, because I think we conceive
of the world through story. It seems to be that it is a fundamental
aspect of who we are, something that goes beyond nurture and might
even be encoded in our DNA. Why else are there Seven Basic Plots or
two kinds of stories or one general arc of a narrative? Why is it
that we remember and tell stories about everything – we package
information in story, whether two thousand years ago in Greek
tragedy or today in a Facebook post. And at the root of all this is
the story, the fiction, that we tell ourselves to get by from day
to day. I am me. I sit here. I speak into this microphone. Well,
what will it mean when I can watch myself doing this at a distance,
and become someone or something else entirely? What happens when I
forget that I can take the goggles off?

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About the Podcast

Your weekly podcast for a world in flux.
Globalization and climate change. The rise of social media and the decline and fall of Blockbuster Video. AI and VR. Donald Trump and Flat Earthers. The world is changing so fast that we can't get a grip on how we got here, let alone where we're headed.
Join Ben Charland as he peels back the headlines to ask, what are the events, characters, forces and ideas that shape the human story today? Have things always been this nuts, or are they getting crazier by the day? Who were those barbarians that took down the Blockbuster Empire? Just what on Earth is going on?